LISTENING IS A COMBAT SPORT
Real listening, let’s be honest, is rare. ​
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We talk about it, we ask for it at work, with family or with our friends, but in real life? eh ? ...It's not the best shared thing in the world. In my business, people come to me to be more impactful, more charismatic, they dream of being able to bring teams with them through the simple power of their speech. I believe in this power, I believe in its beauty, and I believe moreover that it is a gift that needs to be worked on. Someone can become a good speaker through work and repetition, I am convinced, but what about listening? Can we learn to listen? Not certain, and yet it seems fundamental in any quality exchange process.
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Listening is based on a paradox, which is that it is defined implicitly in relation to noise. The incessant noise that threatens her. In a remarkable book published in 2021 Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment documentary book by professors Daniel Kahneman (Nobel Prize in economics), Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein the authors deal with the negative influence of this “noise” in judgment and human decision-making.
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The first noise we have to face is our inner music, our prejudices, our aprioris which create a real filter for true listening. Our experience, our family beliefs, our academic training, our social roots are all sources of noise which certainly constitute our backbone but which play tricks on us when it comes to listening. How many discussions undermined by our own framework of thought? The word “listen” in Japanese means both “to listen” and “to ask.” What an astonishing thing linguistics is when it helps us to reflect on the deeper meaning of these two notions. Let us attempt an interpretation; Wouldn’t it be that for the Japanese, asking someone something is putting oneself in the elegant position of being ready to “listen” to the other’s response. This semantic detour gives us a clue about the fact of listening as being the capacity to temporarily renounce one's own point of view, to be ready to welcome the other's point of view in place of one's own. The question of Being right or not does not come into play here, it is a question of understanding what place we leave to the other.
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"The question of being right or does not come into play here, it is about understanding what place we leave to the other"
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So are there methods to listen better? The Americans talk about “Deep Listening”. It’s a field that can involve meditation, music, the arts... and which seems interesting to me to explore. We are talking about making the difference between what we hear voluntarily or involuntarily and the intentional action of listening. On a daily basis, here is an experience that I submit to you to begin this path of “deep listening”: you ask someone to tell you about their day, what they thought of a film, their impression of the new director commercial... While your interlocutor is speaking, you challenge yourself to listen without speaking, without commenting, without contradicting, without approving for a full minute. Sixty seconds dedicated to fully listening to the other, to their speech but also to the way in which the words are said, their posture or their gestures. You can try the experience in a group of several people. The challenge can then go up to 3 minutes of silence. The effect on what we understand about the motivations, moods and intentions of the other is tenfold compared to a usual interaction. I use this very powerful coaching approach every day in my work, so please share your experiences with us and the effect it has had on you and your understanding of others.
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Raphaël
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